Check if a Student Really Read a Book
Teacher Knows if You've Washed the E-Reading
SAN ANTONIO — Several Texas A&Thousand professors know something that generations of teachers could just hope to guess: whether students are reading their textbooks.
They know when students are skipping pages, failing to highlight significant passages, non bothering to take notes — or but non opening the volume at all.
"It's Large Blood brother, sort of, but with a practiced intent," said Tracy Hurley, the dean of the schoolhouse of business.
The kinesthesia members here are neither clairvoyant nor peering over shoulders. They, along with colleagues at 8 other colleges, are testing technology from a Silicon Valley start-up, CourseSmart, that allows them to track their students' progress with digital textbooks.
Major publishers in college pedagogy have already been collecting data from millions of students who utilize their digital materials. Simply CourseSmart goes further past individually packaging for each professor information on all the students in a class — a bold effort that is already first to affect how teachers present fabric and how students respond to it, even as critics question how well it measures learning. The plan is to innovate the program broadly this fall.
Adrian Guardia, a Texas A&Thousand instructor in management, took notice the other solar day of a student who was apparently doing well. His quiz grades were solid, and and then was what CourseSmart calls his "engagement index." Just Mr. Guardia also saw something else: that the educatee had opened his textbook only one time.
"It was ane of those aha moments," said Mr. Guardia, who is tracking 70 students in three classes. "Are yous actually learning if you simply open the volume the night before the exam? I knew I had to reach out to him to hash out his studying habits."
Students do not come across their engagement indexes unless a professor shows them, just they know the books are watching them. For a few, simply hearing the number is a shock. Charles Tejeda got a C on the last quiz, but the existent revelation that he is struggling was a depression CourseSmart alphabetize.
"They caught me," said Mr. Tejeda, 43. He has ii jobs and three children, and can study only late at night. "Maybe I need to focus more," he said.
CourseSmart is endemic past Pearson, McGraw-Hill and other major publishers, which see an opportunity to cement their dominance in digital textbooks by offering administrators and faculty a constant stream of data about how students are doing.
In the old days, teachers knew if students understood the course from the expressions on their faces. Now some classes, including one of Mr. Guardia's, are entirely virtual. Appointment information could give the colleges early warning about which students might flunk out, while more broadly letting teachers know if the whole form is falling backside.
Somewhen, the data will flow back to the publishers, to assistance set new editions.
Academic and popular publishers, besides as some authors, have dreamed for years of such feedback to straight sales and editorial efforts more efficiently. Amazon and Barnes & Noble are presumed to be collecting a trove of data from readers, although they decline to say what, if anything, they will do with it.
The predigital era, when writers wrote and publishers published without a inkling, is seen as an amazingly ignorant time. "Before this, the publisher never knew if Chapter 3 was even looked at," said Sean Devine, CourseSmart's main executive.
Paradigm 
More than 3.5 1000000 students and educators use CourseSmart textbooks and are already generating reams of data well-nigh Chapter 3. Among the colleges experimenting this semester are Clemson, Central Carolina Technical College and Stony Brook University, as well as Texas A&M-San Antonio, a new offshoot.
Texas A&Thousand has 1 of the highest four-yr graduation rates in the state, simply merely half the students brand it out in that time. "If CourseSmart offers to hook it up to every class, we wouldn't reject," said Dr. Hurley, the dean.
At a recent session here of a management training class, Mr. Guardia addressed how to intervene efficiently with underperformers. The students watched a video of a print shop manager chewing out an employee without knowing the circumstances. The moral: The manager needed better data.
Then Mr. Guardia discussed with his students the analytics of their own reading, which he had due east-mailed to them. The students suggested that once more better information was needed. Several said their score was beingness minimized considering they took notes on newspaper.
Others complained there were software bugs, a response Mr. Guardia has heard before. The educatee who was cramming at the last minute said, for instance, that he had opened the textbook several times, not just once. Perhaps these are the digital equivalent of "the domestic dog ate my homework." CourseSmart said it knew of no problems with its software.
The start-upwards said its surveys indicated few privacy concerns amongst students or colleges, and this was borne out by the course. "Large Brother," said 1 student, but that was a joke, and everyone snickered. Being watched is a fundamental role of the earth they live in.
"Amazon has such a footprint on me," said Carol Johnson, 51, who works in the tech industry. "It knows more than my mother."
Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard'south Graduate Schoolhouse of Education, is more than apprehensive. He believes analytics are important in the classroom, just they must be based on high-quality data.
The CourseSmart system has other potential problems; students could hands game the highlighting or note-taking functions. Or a student might improve his score by leaving his textbook open and doing something else.
"The possibilities of harm are tremendous if teachers are naïve plenty to think these scores mean anything for the vast majority of students," Professor Dede said.
CourseSmart says the data it collects now is a beginning. "Nosotros'll ultimately show how the pupil traverses the book," Mr. Devine said. "There's a correlation and causality betwixt date and success."
There is also correlation, the students are learning, between perception and success.
Hillary Torres, a senior, is a practiced student with a low engagement alphabetize, probably considering she is taking notes into a figurer file not being tracked. This could be a problem; she is a member of the Guild for Human Resource Management, whose local chapter is advised by Mr. Guardia. "If he looks and sees, 'Hillary is not really reading as much as I thought,' does that give him a negative image of me?" she wondered. "His opinion really matters. Perhaps I need to change my report habits."
After ii months of using the system, Mr. Guardia is coming to some conclusions of his own. His students generally are scoring well on quizzes and assignments. In the quondam days, that might have reassured him. Just their engagement indexes are low.
"Peradventure the course is too like shooting fish in a barrel and I need to challenge them a bit more," Mr. Guardia said. "Or maybe the textbooks are non as good as I thought."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/technology/coursesmart-e-textbooks-track-students-progress-for-teachers.html
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